The last several years has seen an increasing number of heat exchangers employed in vehicles. One heat exchange fluid is the air in which the vehicle is moving which is commonly ducted through a grill or the like to pass through the heat exchanger with assistance from a fan driven either by the engine or by a small electric motor.
In the early days of vehicles, liquid cooled engines required only a single heat exchanger of the type alluded to previously. As is well known, they were commonly termed radiators and were utilized for cooling the liquid coolant for the engine.
As the complexity of vehicles increased, other air cooled heat exchangers were added. Frequently, the provision of an automatic transmission requires a so-called oil cooler as a second form of heat exchanger.
The increasing use of air conditioning in vehicles has necessitated that such vehicles have additional air cooled heat exchangers in the form of condensers. And, with the increased use of turbochargers, there has been an increasing move towards the use of so-called intercoolers or charge air coolers which are heat exchangers that cool compressed combustion air from the turbocharger prior to its being admitted into the engine combustion chamber or chambers.
Constraints on vehicle fuel economy have led to constraints on vehicle size which in turn have led to constraints on the amount of grill area available on a car that may be occupied by the heat exchangers. Consequently, it is necessary to superimpose heat exchangers or dispose them in side by side relationship, or both. This leads to difficulty in installation during manufacture as well as to difficulty in achieving access to a given one of the heat exchanger in the event repair or other attention is required.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the above problems.